bypass

UK/ˈbaɪpɑːs/US/ˈbaɪpæs/

verbC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,404 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: bypassed, bypassing, bypasses

To bypass is to go round something instead of through it. Bypass the town, bypass the committee, a bypass road.

A heart bypass reroutes blood around a blocked artery using a vessel taken from elsewhere in the body, which is the same idea as the road. Bypassing a procedure is usually a criticism, since procedures exist to be gone through.

Definitions of bypass

1verbbypassTo go round something instead of through it.C1
“The new road bypasses the town centre, so there's less traffic in the high street.”

bypass is a going round.

Where it comes from

By plus pass. The road sense came first and the surgical one borrowed the image directly.

Middle English
*bypassen
English, today
bypass

From Middle English bypassen, bipassen (suggested by past participle by-past, bipast), equivalent to by- + pass.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

bypass in the wild

The ratio of the mass-flow of air bypassing the engine core to the mass-flow of air passing through the core is referred to as the bypass ratio.
Turbofan
Most commercial aviation jet engines in use are of the high-bypass type, and most modern fighter engines are low-bypass.
Turbofan
The bypass ratio (BPR) of a turbofan engine is the ratio between the mass flow rate of the bypass stream to the mass flow rate entering the core.
Bypass ratio
A 10:1 bypass ratio, for example, means that 10 kg of air passes through the bypass duct for every 1 kg of air passing through the core.
Bypass ratio
The long-term mortality rate of gastric bypass patients has been shown to be reduced by up to 40%.
Gastric bypass surgery

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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